The hotel information is comprehensive. And by the way, if you won a hotel and you usually have both eyes on Tripadvisor, you had better make sure your business listing on Google is as well-optimised as it can be.

Make sure you have all your services in there, some really good photos – as many as they allow . Leave no box unfilled or un-ticked.

Encourage guests to leave reviews on Google, without crossing the line of actually writing them or offering and incentive.

If they need any hand-holding – it can be difficult for a first time to work out how to leave a review – point out that if they search for your hotel when they are signed into Google, they should find a knowledge box on the right hand side of the results.

Lufthansa seems to have managed the communications around the crash in the French Alps very well, offering clear and concise information while at the same time, showing due compassion to those affected.

So far it has been a textbook example of mobilising what I suspect is a well-rehearsed plan.

I can’t help thinking however, there will be stern tests to come. So far the airline and its Germanwings subsidiary has said it had no way of knowing Lubitz, the co-pilot of the aircraft, was so mentally unstable or fragile that he might crash his plane into a mountainside. And so far this seems to have been accepted.

However I expect this notion to be probed and tested very thoroughly over the coming weeks and if the airline is shown to have ignored any warning signs, it may yet succumb to serious damage to its reputation. At the very least it might have to ditch the Germanwings brand in due course as part of the rebuilding process.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for holidaymakers in Praia da Luz.

Mark Warner would rather refer to the resort as Ocean Club Beach Resort but clearly most people can make the connection and – from the Mark Warner prices, which tend to be a bit lower than at their other resorts – it must be one of their hardest sells.

I don’t suppose that will change as long as it stays in the news pages rather than the holiday section.

Developing a travel PR campaign for affiliate clients presents a particular challenge. After all they do not own their own hotels, boats, planes, they do not sell their own package holidays and most of the time they do not even mind who you travel with.

That leaves us a bit short of stories on the PR side.

Travel affiliate clients just want traffic, which they can then convert to clickers to send on their way to happy merchants in exchange for a slice of the pie.

There’s very little there for a traditional travel PR to get their teeth into. Or is there?

Businesses will be able to monitor their reputation on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and react in “real time” using a service launched this month by Scottish company Reputation Plus.

Set up by Neil MacLean, a former journalist, and Claire Dean, a TV and radio reporter and presenter, Reputation Plus claims to offer the first “online, real time customer service for UK business”.

Although Scotland on Sunday particularly mentions our real time customer service in terms of providing reputation services for financial institutions, there is also a strong travel PR element to ReputationPlus as you would expect.… Read More »

There has been discussion on Twitter over the last few days on the role of SEO in contemporary Travel PR. I am massively biased in this; my reflex action on opening a new travel site is to view source code. And I have a keyboard shortcut which turns H and 1 into <h1></h1> in a nano second.

I believe an understanding of how to be more easily found online is vital to travel PR.

At the very least, if you are a travel PR and you want to get your client’s story across to the widest possible market, you need a basic knowledge of SEO.

I don’t necessarily mean the shady and complex world of buying authority links without Google registering the acrid smell of cheque book – although, wait a minute that sounds like a better reason than most these days for a press trip.

I mean the business of making sure everything you publish on behalf of your client is useful, easily found and as widely distributed as possible.… Read More »

While researching restaurant reviews for the Sunday Times – and by researching I mean spilling gravy down my shirt – a manager would often stop by and ask how everything was. “Fine” I would say. “Read about it on Sunday,” I would think. “Thanks,” I would say.

If it had been awful – if maggots had been playing in the venison stew – I would be itching to pull the trigger, to tell the world while I was still pulling on my coat. But sadly there was no way to actually publish a restaurant review directly from the table.